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I'm torn whenever I hear stuff like this about my high-functioning (non-mentally handicapped) peers struggling out there. Half of me thinks: How weak. Don't t

I'm torn whenever I hear stuff like this about my high-functioning (non-mentally handicapped) peers struggling out there. Half of me thinks: How weak. Don't they get it? It's not about "money" or "jobs". Those are abstractions. You have to create value. What do YOU do that's valuable? Why should someone hire you? Why should someone pay you? Can't they see? Quit blaming the economy. Quit waiting to be hired. Bring the locus of control inside. Put in on you. Go to the public library and start learning. Make yourself valuable. With enough determination and will, you will find a way. Or you will make one. Less fortunate people than you have done it. Dumber people than you have done it. That half of me recognizes that the hard work, the learning, the hours I've put in to get traction on a strong path of entrepreneurship wasn't handed to me. It wasn't intuitive. I make sacrifices, I toil, I struggle, but I make it work. Why can't they? The other half of me wonders: Why do I realize all that? It's a rather meta though. But... I can't tell you honestly why my life fell into place so that I would be so driven. Why my life fell just so, so I would be curious enough to seek out the books, essays, podcasts, and blog posts that have shaped my entrepreneurial character. Why was I drawn towards the heroes and role models that I was - business and technology leaders, instead of rock-stars or athletes - who inspired me towards a particular path? Sure, it has taken talent, drive, hard work, and sacrifice to capitalize on the opportunity presented to me. But perhaps it was the greatest luck of all - the lottery of birth - that gave me those gifts in the first place.

redschell 14y ago
I know how you feel. I count my lucky stars that I consider Elon Musk a role model and Kim Kardashian a fat-assed clown.
onedev 14y ago
This is so well put and exactly how I feel.
DamnYuppie 14y ago
The only issue I have with your first argument is that the majority of the people doing the hiring have no idea how to readily determine someones value. Often times they fall back on the easily quantifiable such as school, employment, and in our industry technical qualifications. Even at that few are able to administer even the barest of sniff tests to separate the wheat from the chaff. Otherwise I don't really disagree with you.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
You will discover a wealth of wisdom when you get the answer to this question: "Don't they get it?" Of all the things I have chosen to do in my life, by far the most challenging has been raising kids. I cannot tell you how many times I wished I had some super power like telepathy to convey a concept directly into their brains because words just weren't cutting it. The whole idea of taking the locus of control and bringing it inside (love that btw) is what I wanted to teach, and sometimes it gets lost in the "You could make this happen, why don't you?!" Your kids have to be confident enough to know that their failures aren't a reflection on their worth, but not so confident that they push the failure outside and into a place where they can deny an ability to change it. Once it 'clicks' the world changes, before it clicks you're adrift in the white water rapids of life. Once you 'get it' you realize you don't have to stop the river you just have to exert the necessary force to navigate around the hazards, before that all you can think is that "nothing can stop this river, its going to kill me!" I haven't a freakin' clue how to teach that.
- kamaal 14y ago
  I'm still single, and not kids. Will it work if kids are given some lesson by sending through hard experience? Lets say I tell the kid I will give him a buck extra for a buck he saves. How would the kid go about it?
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    I've always tried to give my kids as many different experiences as I can, when they were young I tried to set things up so that we could fail together at things, and then work through them. It was important that they learn that failure is a way to learn how to not fail. Ignorance is just a signal that there is something else to learn. Pain is nature's way of saying "Hey, reconsider carefully what you are doing or just did." But every kid is different, so the only advice I can really give is this; Understand that your kids are learning all the time, be mindful and deliberate in your interactions.
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jjoonathan 14y ago
You think about them: "How weak." They think about you: "How lucky." You're both somewhere between half correct and entirely correct. > Quit blaming the economy. > With enough determination and will, you will find a way. Or you will make one. You seem awfully certain of that. I can't help but wonder if this view derives primarily from confirmation bias or if it represents an accurate appraisal of the market. I think your conclusion holds with regard to the tech sector (most of us probably do) but I'm much less convinced that it generalizes. There's no cosmic entity guaranteeing that "a way" is present, only the economy. It's pointless to argue over the particular combination of self-reliant traits and opportunity that leads to success, but ignoring the correlation between the economy, opportunity, and success, is obnoxious and leads to short-sighted and self-serving policy positions. > it has taken talent, drive, hard work, and sacrifice to capitalize on the opportunity presented to me. See, here's the problem: there's a positive feedback loop between opportunity and success and down at the "no success" (poor) end of the spectrum the availability of opportunity is strongly determined by the economy. Talent takes time and resources to develop, drive takes resources to exploit, and hard work has no inherent value. You can't capitalize on something you you don't have. For the poor, acquiring resources means having a job, and it's possible for the conditions around that to be shitty enough to inhibit progress along self-determined directions even for the most driven of individuals. Nobody would argue that Chinese wage-slaves or starving African children are simply failing to capitalize on readily available opportunities. For less extreme examples of opportunity deprivation, less extreme conclusions still hold. Just because the tech sector is in a fairly rosy position right now doesn't mean we should bury our heads in the sand and pretend like our victories are due to "superiority of drive" or "understanding of value". We should fight to increase the amount of opportunity available to society's poorest members. Sometimes this means offering resources necessary for "bootstrapping". Other times it means chopping down barriers to entry by punishing anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior. I don't believe our society does nearly enough of either. I know that your post wasn't advocating a political position and was instead observing that a certain attitude is best for self-development. HOWEVER, I see way too many people who get drunk on the combination of this attitude with confirmation bias and then proceed to take the short-sighted and self-serving policy positions I mentioned earlier. End rant.
falcolas 14y ago
I apologize in advance, but I mean every word. What kind of entitled bullshit is this? > Quit blaming the economy. The simple truth is that it's difficult to get money in this economy without either an established job, and established home, or a reserve of cash from which to build something. Just because the tech sector is doing well doesn't mean that all sectors are doing well. > Quit waiting to be hired. What do you suggest? He build a company from the public library, while living out of a homeless shelter and eating in soup kitchens? > Bring the locus of control inside. Put in on you. I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. It sounds like something you'd hear at a bad self-help seminar. > Go to the public library and start learning. The man in this story was trying to get a degree (granted, humanities isn't one of the more employable degrees). He couldn't afford it; a public library is a poor substitute to a school. > Make yourself valuable. With what? He is lacking in resources from which to build his future. > I make sacrifices, I toil, I struggle, but I make it work. Why can't they? What makes you think they are not? Would you have been able to make it if you had been dropped from college halfway through your bachelors degree with no money? Would you have been able to get VC funding without the contacts you made in college, or even a home address? Why do you think you're smarter than he is, and not just luckier?
- zem 14y ago
  i could not have said it better myself. even if he is smarter and not just luckier, so what? the fact of the matter is, in sheer production terms it's becoming increasingly unnecessary for everyone to have a job; it's just that the "working and 'making your own way' is the only right/moral/ethical/deserving way to live" mentality is so deeply ingrained in people that they are unwilling to face up to the fact.
  - zanny 14y ago
    I am in this exact age group, and my circumstances are almost similar. I got lucky, my family is very close knit so I'm able to live with my mother, and up to 3 relatives have given me opportunities to move in if my mother couldn't handle me playing parasite. I made the dumb mistake of going to a small private college for CS. There were only 2 professors in the department and at most around 8 seniors, so we had an insanely good professor to student ratio. Problem is, the career center had no connections in the tech industry and as a result I have been trying to solo my way into a software job having graduated in 3 years with my bachelors with a 3.3 gpa and no internships since the year I was planning to have one in the summer, I found out I could graduate early so I took the chance. Then I found out almost every intern opportunity requires an active .edu email or some other validation to show you are an active student. So I'm in the awkward position where I'm working on FOSS projects whenever I can, while playing homemaker for my mother to "earn my keep", and trying to get a leg in. But the real getter is that I am not some rock star coder. I'm not really good at it, at all. I don't have great recall of the myriad of algorithms (I know what A* is, but would have to Google a proper implementation). Same with with a spline or a rope. If I write software, I usually end up spending a few hours on ~300 lines just debugging it into a working state with a standard library reference open the whole time. I understand the languages I use - I can write regexes, I know locks, etc, but I usually just hit some gap in my knowledge snag that gets me caught up for a while. For example, I was trying to use Python subprocess to do some calls into nvidia-settings and various other fan controllers(I was writing a script to intelligently control my machines fans since the default Linux fan controls kind of suck). Took me 3 hours to figure out that the best way to get standard out was to use subprocess.check_output because temp files as pipes didn't work (at least for me). So all my interviews so far have basically gone the same way - I don't produce perfect code from memory, and as a result I don't get consideration (there are more reasons than that, but I get the impression), especially without any past employment experience and only 2 personal projects (which are really just scripts) across github and gitorious. I also have an awful personality most people can't relate to - I'm an introverted cynic. Even if I can try to fake behavior around others I always crack and act like myself again at some point. I have a really hard time making small talk and being chummy, for example. So I can relate to the large portion of the population that isn't an Elon Musk super-genius entrepreneur or some John Carmack coding god whose every line of code reads like prose that five hundred years from now professors will read off to CS students like Shakespeare. I'm not even particularly average, because I have very little concrete experience - I just have a gigabyte of source files for homework and projects from school, a few commits to various FOSS projects that changed a line or two. I'm trying to make something I can show off but I lack the imagination to come up with something novel that I can realistically build by myself in a month or two (since I'm always worried I might end up just like the kids in this article, out on the street). Sorry for the rant, I just feel like the guy two posts up is kind of lucky to be talented.
mtnman 14y ago
Wow. Not to get personal, but you're a douchebag.
- AVTizzle 14y ago
  No offense taken.
bjustin 14y ago
Sometimes I think like the first half of what you describe. Surely, if you really want something and have a decent head on your shoulders, you can obtain it. The problem is, sometimes you just don't understand. I have no concept of hard work, having largely coasted through high school and even maybe even more so in college. Were I homeless, I wouldn't know where to begin "creating value". Fortunately, I'm employed as a software developer now. I stopped coasting and take my job seriously. Were I driven, I bet I would be an employer (or self-employed) rather than an employee. But then I also could make my savings work to avoid becoming homeless when not earning much money.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Just to push a point about the effect of luck: > But then I also could make my savings work to avoid becoming homeless when not earning much money. You've taken reasonable steps to avoid homelessness. What happens if someone pushes a software bug out to your bank? (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9371452/RBS-computer-glitch-Ulster-Bank-customers-still-hit-by-crisis.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...) (http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/ulster-bankrsquos-computer-chaos-may-enter-a-third-week-16177305.html http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northe...) It's easy to think "I would cope if I had no access to my bank accounts for three weeks" but until you've faced it it's hard to understand how tough it can be. And for some people the consequences were a few extra days in jail: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18589280 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18589280)
crasshopper 14y ago
How weak. Of course, the weak are to be looked down upon! May John Galt bless the boot of your heel as you crush those idiots who haven't figured out what DO they do that's valuable. I'll be thinking of you next time I toss a Rails book at a homeless person and tell them to stop whining.
- agilebyte 14y ago
  For anyone in the Rand camp (I know I was), realize that even if people wanted to become the future workhorses of the World, a good quarter of us are ill either physically or at various parts of our lives mentally. It is a bit unreasonable to demand that people not be human...
HeyImAlex 14y ago
Tell me about your life. Supportive parents? Good school? College paid for? I can't imagine anyone other than a person who's definition of adversity includes "having to study really hard" making a post so sickeningly lacking in basic human empathy.
lnanek2 14y ago
Honestly, I often think the same sort of way. Blaming the economy doesn't do anything useful, even if it is at fault. The thing you can control most is yourself, so often you whip that. It does seem really strange to me sometimes when I see people having trouble finding work, but they won't relocate or other things that are simply meaningless to me. They do often have less resources to make themselves valuable, though. I had a computer and lots of free time to program constantly my whole life. Someone working fastfood who likes to socialize and smoke in their free time would have to give a lot up, or not even be able to afford to spend time learning even if they wanted to. Most of them don't want to give up their going out at night, or watching TV or whatever anyway. Oh, well, everyone has their own values. You can try to explain to them that they have extra variables and knobs they can spin when they get desperate enough to want to change at least.
chirp 14y ago
"With enough determination and will, you will find a way" This line of thinking is very dangerous and patently false. You need to bone up on how much one's socioeconomic class affect your chances at doing anything. Besides which, your suggestion does nothing about addressing how to enable people to be productive, it just says that you try and be better than those around you, which even if that works, still leaves all the people you beat to suffer and become a drag on society as a whole. It also completely avoids answering the question of why this is even happening in the first place. Let me ask you this, would you have the same suggestion to someone who is homeless in India? If you've been to India you'd see how ignorant your thinking is. Why do you people think that the US is some magical place where dreams and wishes come true if you just work hard enough? It's the bullshit the politicians feed us to make you all think we're all millionaires in waiting. This is why we're all going to hell in a hand basket. You need to start taking more responsibility for our fellow citizens. You want to live a place where it's just up to the individual to "make it", go to the developing world and see how much you like it. The reason it's better in the West is because we all share, or at least used to, a similar standard of living. This homelessness in the youth affects you whether you like it or not. You won't like it very much when your town is crawling with them and unemployment is double digits. I can tell you now that your shitty advice and self aggrandizing will be of no help. "I can't tell you honestly why my life fell into place so that I would be so driven" Your arrogance is breathtaking. Maybe if the street people start sucking Steve Job's cock the way you do they'll get a clue and start really sacrificing so they too can get ahead. My best wish for you is that you fail miserably at everything you do so you'll get the chance to put your money where your mouth is, and work your way up to the top as you eat out of a garbage can and sleep under a bridge. When you do that, come back and I'll issue an apology.
- ionforce 14y ago
  Wow, why don't you eat shit? His entire post was lamenting the fact that he is ignorant, why do you have to berate him over it?
DanBC 14y ago
> But perhaps it was the greatest luck of all It's a shame you buried this at the end of your post. It's also a shame that you don't appear to recognise that a life, any life, perhaps your life, can be destroyed by that same luck. It takes surprisingly little to make a person homeless. Until someone's been in that situation they find it hard to understand why it's so hard.
Tichy 14y ago
It's not a given that there is always something valuable to do. And even if you start some venture, success is not a given either. I agree with not giving up, but what if you need money right now, to eat and get a roof above your head? Starting some venture that creates value might take a while, too, and require some capital which you don't have.
yorak 14y ago
I think some people take AVTizzles comment or, as I see it, flow of thought too harshly. My interpretation of his comment is that he is not giving a statement or preaching about the true way (tm) of doing things Right. I feel that he did a honest attempt to understand why it is so that at the same time there is capable young people sleeping on the streets and capable young people donating $500 million to charity? Why this world is like that? Some people seem to get angry when someone is trying to find out the reason why as if they'd have the answers. We all know that shooting the messenger does not help. Is is some kind of self-blame in works what drives people to a sort of resentment presented in some of the replies?
- AVTizzle 14y ago
  Thank you for understanding.
kokey 14y ago
I'm with you on this. I dropped out of high school because it was becoming hard for my parents to support me, and there was certainly never going to be any money for university education. This is in a developing country, where English wasn't even my first language. Yet, I've always had this curiosity that made me want to learn, and want to better myself and my life. I've moved between countries and started from scratch a few times, having to make opportunities for myself. I think I've been lucky to not be stupid, but I'm also wondering if my upbringing didn't help a lot more than I thought. My mother took me to the library a lot as a kid, and my father was never good with money or appeared hard working or ambitious, but he was always knowledgeable or able to explain things very well and a rational manner. I was left to my own devices and guided to take responsibility for my own well being and figure things out for myself. Maybe that was it, I don't know.
calinet6 14y ago
You got the "luck" part right. The rest, the "other half" you spoke of first, is solid gold bullshit. We can talk about hard work and smarts all you want. You can even bring up outliers—cases where people have pulled themselves up from hardship and succeeded anyway. But they are not statistically supported. The truth is that the better upbringing you've had, the more opportunities you have had to improve yourself and your abilities, and the larger support network you have, the more likely it is you will succeed. It really is that simple. It is situational. Purge your mind of the bullshit, because it is incorrect flawed logic.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
I see you've never heard the term overproduction before.
benburleson 14y ago
I'm 33 and remember when I was in high school, there was a trend growing in the grades below me to reward all students, no matter whether they achieved anything or not. "Participation awards" became the hot new thing. I honestly wonder if this has had an impact on that generation just after me.

redschell 14y ago

I know how you feel. I count my lucky stars that I consider Elon Musk a role model and Kim Kardashian a fat-assed clown.

onedev 14y ago

This is so well put and exactly how I feel.

DamnYuppie 14y ago

The only issue I have with your first argument is that the majority of the people doing the hiring have no idea how to readily determine someones value. Often times they fall back on the easily quantifiable such as school, employment, and in our industry technical qualifications. Even at that few are able to administer even the barest of sniff tests to separate the wheat from the chaff. Otherwise I don't really disagree with you.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

You will discover a wealth of wisdom when you get the answer to this question: "Don't they get it?" Of all the things I have chosen to do in my life, by far the most challenging has been raising kids. I cannot tell you how many times I wished I had some super power like telepathy to convey a concept directly into their brains because words just weren't cutting it. The whole idea of taking the locus of control and bringing it inside (love that btw) is what I wanted to teach, and sometimes it gets lost in the "You could make this happen, why don't you?!" Your kids have to be confident enough to know that their failures aren't a reflection on their worth, but not so confident that they push the failure outside and into a place where they can deny an ability to change it. Once it 'clicks' the world changes, before it clicks you're adrift in the white water rapids of life. Once you 'get it' you realize you don't have to stop the river you just have to exert the necessary force to navigate around the hazards, before that all you can think is that "nothing can stop this river, its going to kill me!" I haven't a freakin' clue how to teach that.

kamaal 14y ago
I'm still single, and not kids. Will it work if kids are given some lesson by sending through hard experience? Lets say I tell the kid I will give him a buck extra for a buck he saves. How would the kid go about it?
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I've always tried to give my kids as many different experiences as I can, when they were young I tried to set things up so that we could fail together at things, and then work through them. It was important that they learn that failure is a way to learn how to not fail. Ignorance is just a signal that there is something else to learn. Pain is nature's way of saying "Hey, reconsider carefully what you are doing or just did." But every kid is different, so the only advice I can really give is this; Understand that your kids are learning all the time, be mindful and deliberate in your interactions.
- deleted 14y ago
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jjoonathan 14y ago

You think about them: "How weak." They think about you: "How lucky." You're both somewhere between half correct and entirely correct. > Quit blaming the economy. > With enough determination and will, you will find a way. Or you will make one. You seem awfully certain of that. I can't help but wonder if this view derives primarily from confirmation bias or if it represents an accurate appraisal of the market. I think your conclusion holds with regard to the tech sector (most of us probably do) but I'm much less convinced that it generalizes. There's no cosmic entity guaranteeing that "a way" is present, only the economy. It's pointless to argue over the particular combination of self-reliant traits and opportunity that leads to success, but ignoring the correlation between the economy, opportunity, and success, is obnoxious and leads to short-sighted and self-serving policy positions. > it has taken talent, drive, hard work, and sacrifice to capitalize on the opportunity presented to me. See, here's the problem: there's a positive feedback loop between opportunity and success and down at the "no success" (poor) end of the spectrum the availability of opportunity is strongly determined by the economy. Talent takes time and resources to develop, drive takes resources to exploit, and hard work has no inherent value. You can't capitalize on something you you don't have. For the poor, acquiring resources means having a job, and it's possible for the conditions around that to be shitty enough to inhibit progress along self-determined directions even for the most driven of individuals. Nobody would argue that Chinese wage-slaves or starving African children are simply failing to capitalize on readily available opportunities. For less extreme examples of opportunity deprivation, less extreme conclusions still hold. Just because the tech sector is in a fairly rosy position right now doesn't mean we should bury our heads in the sand and pretend like our victories are due to "superiority of drive" or "understanding of value". We should fight to increase the amount of opportunity available to society's poorest members. Sometimes this means offering resources necessary for "bootstrapping". Other times it means chopping down barriers to entry by punishing anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior. I don't believe our society does nearly enough of either. I know that your post wasn't advocating a political position and was instead observing that a certain attitude is best for self-development. HOWEVER, I see way too many people who get drunk on the combination of this attitude with confirmation bias and then proceed to take the short-sighted and self-serving policy positions I mentioned earlier. End rant.

falcolas 14y ago

I apologize in advance, but I mean every word. What kind of entitled bullshit is this? > Quit blaming the economy. The simple truth is that it's difficult to get money in this economy without either an established job, and established home, or a reserve of cash from which to build something. Just because the tech sector is doing well doesn't mean that all sectors are doing well. > Quit waiting to be hired. What do you suggest? He build a company from the public library, while living out of a homeless shelter and eating in soup kitchens? > Bring the locus of control inside. Put in on you. I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. It sounds like something you'd hear at a bad self-help seminar. > Go to the public library and start learning. The man in this story was trying to get a degree (granted, humanities isn't one of the more employable degrees). He couldn't afford it; a public library is a poor substitute to a school. > Make yourself valuable. With what? He is lacking in resources from which to build his future. > I make sacrifices, I toil, I struggle, but I make it work. Why can't they? What makes you think they are not? Would you have been able to make it if you had been dropped from college halfway through your bachelors degree with no money? Would you have been able to get VC funding without the contacts you made in college, or even a home address? Why do you think you're smarter than he is, and not just luckier?

zem 14y ago
i could not have said it better myself. even if he is smarter and not just luckier, so what? the fact of the matter is, in sheer production terms it's becoming increasingly unnecessary for everyone to have a job; it's just that the "working and 'making your own way' is the only right/moral/ethical/deserving way to live" mentality is so deeply ingrained in people that they are unwilling to face up to the fact.
- zanny 14y ago
  I am in this exact age group, and my circumstances are almost similar. I got lucky, my family is very close knit so I'm able to live with my mother, and up to 3 relatives have given me opportunities to move in if my mother couldn't handle me playing parasite. I made the dumb mistake of going to a small private college for CS. There were only 2 professors in the department and at most around 8 seniors, so we had an insanely good professor to student ratio. Problem is, the career center had no connections in the tech industry and as a result I have been trying to solo my way into a software job having graduated in 3 years with my bachelors with a 3.3 gpa and no internships since the year I was planning to have one in the summer, I found out I could graduate early so I took the chance. Then I found out almost every intern opportunity requires an active .edu email or some other validation to show you are an active student. So I'm in the awkward position where I'm working on FOSS projects whenever I can, while playing homemaker for my mother to "earn my keep", and trying to get a leg in. But the real getter is that I am not some rock star coder. I'm not really good at it, at all. I don't have great recall of the myriad of algorithms (I know what A* is, but would have to Google a proper implementation). Same with with a spline or a rope. If I write software, I usually end up spending a few hours on ~300 lines just debugging it into a working state with a standard library reference open the whole time. I understand the languages I use - I can write regexes, I know locks, etc, but I usually just hit some gap in my knowledge snag that gets me caught up for a while. For example, I was trying to use Python subprocess to do some calls into nvidia-settings and various other fan controllers(I was writing a script to intelligently control my machines fans since the default Linux fan controls kind of suck). Took me 3 hours to figure out that the best way to get standard out was to use subprocess.check_output because temp files as pipes didn't work (at least for me). So all my interviews so far have basically gone the same way - I don't produce perfect code from memory, and as a result I don't get consideration (there are more reasons than that, but I get the impression), especially without any past employment experience and only 2 personal projects (which are really just scripts) across github and gitorious. I also have an awful personality most people can't relate to - I'm an introverted cynic. Even if I can try to fake behavior around others I always crack and act like myself again at some point. I have a really hard time making small talk and being chummy, for example. So I can relate to the large portion of the population that isn't an Elon Musk super-genius entrepreneur or some John Carmack coding god whose every line of code reads like prose that five hundred years from now professors will read off to CS students like Shakespeare. I'm not even particularly average, because I have very little concrete experience - I just have a gigabyte of source files for homework and projects from school, a few commits to various FOSS projects that changed a line or two. I'm trying to make something I can show off but I lack the imagination to come up with something novel that I can realistically build by myself in a month or two (since I'm always worried I might end up just like the kids in this article, out on the street). Sorry for the rant, I just feel like the guy two posts up is kind of lucky to be talented.

mtnman 14y ago

Wow. Not to get personal, but you're a douchebag.

AVTizzle 14y ago
No offense taken.

bjustin 14y ago

Sometimes I think like the first half of what you describe. Surely, if you really want something and have a decent head on your shoulders, you can obtain it. The problem is, sometimes you just don't understand. I have no concept of hard work, having largely coasted through high school and even maybe even more so in college. Were I homeless, I wouldn't know where to begin "creating value". Fortunately, I'm employed as a software developer now. I stopped coasting and take my job seriously. Were I driven, I bet I would be an employer (or self-employed) rather than an employee. But then I also could make my savings work to avoid becoming homeless when not earning much money.

DanBC 14y ago
Just to push a point about the effect of luck: > But then I also could make my savings work to avoid becoming homeless when not earning much money. You've taken reasonable steps to avoid homelessness. What happens if someone pushes a software bug out to your bank? (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9371452/RBS-computer-glitch-Ulster-Bank-customers-still-hit-by-crisis.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...) (http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/ulster-bankrsquos-computer-chaos-may-enter-a-third-week-16177305.html http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northe...) It's easy to think "I would cope if I had no access to my bank accounts for three weeks" but until you've faced it it's hard to understand how tough it can be. And for some people the consequences were a few extra days in jail: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18589280 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18589280)

crasshopper 14y ago

How weak. Of course, the weak are to be looked down upon! May John Galt bless the boot of your heel as you crush those idiots who haven't figured out what DO they do that's valuable. I'll be thinking of you next time I toss a Rails book at a homeless person and tell them to stop whining.

agilebyte 14y ago
For anyone in the Rand camp (I know I was), realize that even if people wanted to become the future workhorses of the World, a good quarter of us are ill either physically or at various parts of our lives mentally. It is a bit unreasonable to demand that people not be human...

HeyImAlex 14y ago

Tell me about your life. Supportive parents? Good school? College paid for? I can't imagine anyone other than a person who's definition of adversity includes "having to study really hard" making a post so sickeningly lacking in basic human empathy.

lnanek2 14y ago

Honestly, I often think the same sort of way. Blaming the economy doesn't do anything useful, even if it is at fault. The thing you can control most is yourself, so often you whip that. It does seem really strange to me sometimes when I see people having trouble finding work, but they won't relocate or other things that are simply meaningless to me. They do often have less resources to make themselves valuable, though. I had a computer and lots of free time to program constantly my whole life. Someone working fastfood who likes to socialize and smoke in their free time would have to give a lot up, or not even be able to afford to spend time learning even if they wanted to. Most of them don't want to give up their going out at night, or watching TV or whatever anyway. Oh, well, everyone has their own values. You can try to explain to them that they have extra variables and knobs they can spin when they get desperate enough to want to change at least.

chirp 14y ago

"With enough determination and will, you will find a way" This line of thinking is very dangerous and patently false. You need to bone up on how much one's socioeconomic class affect your chances at doing anything. Besides which, your suggestion does nothing about addressing how to enable people to be productive, it just says that you try and be better than those around you, which even if that works, still leaves all the people you beat to suffer and become a drag on society as a whole. It also completely avoids answering the question of why this is even happening in the first place. Let me ask you this, would you have the same suggestion to someone who is homeless in India? If you've been to India you'd see how ignorant your thinking is. Why do you people think that the US is some magical place where dreams and wishes come true if you just work hard enough? It's the bullshit the politicians feed us to make you all think we're all millionaires in waiting. This is why we're all going to hell in a hand basket. You need to start taking more responsibility for our fellow citizens. You want to live a place where it's just up to the individual to "make it", go to the developing world and see how much you like it. The reason it's better in the West is because we all share, or at least used to, a similar standard of living. This homelessness in the youth affects you whether you like it or not. You won't like it very much when your town is crawling with them and unemployment is double digits. I can tell you now that your shitty advice and self aggrandizing will be of no help. "I can't tell you honestly why my life fell into place so that I would be so driven" Your arrogance is breathtaking. Maybe if the street people start sucking Steve Job's cock the way you do they'll get a clue and start really sacrificing so they too can get ahead. My best wish for you is that you fail miserably at everything you do so you'll get the chance to put your money where your mouth is, and work your way up to the top as you eat out of a garbage can and sleep under a bridge. When you do that, come back and I'll issue an apology.

ionforce 14y ago
Wow, why don't you eat shit? His entire post was lamenting the fact that he is ignorant, why do you have to berate him over it?

DanBC 14y ago

> But perhaps it was the greatest luck of all It's a shame you buried this at the end of your post. It's also a shame that you don't appear to recognise that a life, any life, perhaps your life, can be destroyed by that same luck. It takes surprisingly little to make a person homeless. Until someone's been in that situation they find it hard to understand why it's so hard.

Tichy 14y ago

It's not a given that there is always something valuable to do. And even if you start some venture, success is not a given either. I agree with not giving up, but what if you need money right now, to eat and get a roof above your head? Starting some venture that creates value might take a while, too, and require some capital which you don't have.

yorak 14y ago

I think some people take AVTizzles comment or, as I see it, flow of thought too harshly. My interpretation of his comment is that he is not giving a statement or preaching about the true way (tm) of doing things Right. I feel that he did a honest attempt to understand why it is so that at the same time there is capable young people sleeping on the streets and capable young people donating $500 million to charity? Why this world is like that? Some people seem to get angry when someone is trying to find out the reason why as if they'd have the answers. We all know that shooting the messenger does not help. Is is some kind of self-blame in works what drives people to a sort of resentment presented in some of the replies?

AVTizzle 14y ago
Thank you for understanding.

kokey 14y ago

I'm with you on this. I dropped out of high school because it was becoming hard for my parents to support me, and there was certainly never going to be any money for university education. This is in a developing country, where English wasn't even my first language. Yet, I've always had this curiosity that made me want to learn, and want to better myself and my life. I've moved between countries and started from scratch a few times, having to make opportunities for myself. I think I've been lucky to not be stupid, but I'm also wondering if my upbringing didn't help a lot more than I thought. My mother took me to the library a lot as a kid, and my father was never good with money or appeared hard working or ambitious, but he was always knowledgeable or able to explain things very well and a rational manner. I was left to my own devices and guided to take responsibility for my own well being and figure things out for myself. Maybe that was it, I don't know.

calinet6 14y ago

You got the "luck" part right. The rest, the "other half" you spoke of first, is solid gold bullshit. We can talk about hard work and smarts all you want. You can even bring up outliers—cases where people have pulled themselves up from hardship and succeeded anyway. But they are not statistically supported. The truth is that the better upbringing you've had, the more opportunities you have had to improve yourself and your abilities, and the larger support network you have, the more likely it is you will succeed. It really is that simple. It is situational. Purge your mind of the bullshit, because it is incorrect flawed logic.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

I see you've never heard the term overproduction before.

benburleson 14y ago

I'm 33 and remember when I was in high school, there was a trend growing in the grades below me to reward all students, no matter whether they achieved anything or not. "Participation awards" became the hot new thing. I honestly wonder if this has had an impact on that generation just after me.